In the world of mobile application development, you can either build applications the standard way, which means using Objective-C to write Apple iOs applications, or Java with the Android SDK for your Android applications etc etc, you get the point. But a new paradigm has appeared that is very appealing to web developers like me as complementary to a skill set I already possess: writing mobile applications using HTML, CSS and Javascript. The tool that makes this magic possible is called PhoneGap and version 1.0 has just been released to I bet, the delight of many mobile developers out there. The concept behind PhoneGap is simple:

• Build your app using HTML and Javascript
• Access the native phone APIs through the PhoneGap wrappers
• Deploy to multiple platforms

The appeal here is reminiscent of the early Java slogan, “Write Once Run Anywhere” or WORA, for those who still remember, and PhoneGap is even lauching a beta for PhoneGap Build, a service that will allow you to “write your app using HTML, CSS or JavaScript, upload it to the PhoneGap Build service and get back app-store ready apps for Apple iOS, Google Android, Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry and more”.  There are a  number of Javascript frameworks out there that can be used to build apps in conjunction with PhoneGap, the  two most popular are JQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch. Both are very capable frameworks that make use of the latest advances in CSS3 and HTML5. Your choice in a guttural way would depend on your familiarity with their browser counterpart (JQuery or ExtJS). What you have to understand at the end of the day with the PhoneGap architecture is that your finished app would basically be a web page running within a browser. Here are a couple tutorials to get you going either on Sencha Touch or JQuery Mobile.

Combined as I mentioned earlier with the fact that by using HTML, CSS and Javascript the learning curve for a web developer is suddenly cut into mere hours instead of the days or even weeks required to learn and master a new heavy language like Objective C or Java, you have to wonder how come every mobile developer out there is not rushing to adopt PhoneGap. Well there are limitations when it comes to building an application using PhoneGap and here is a shortlist (By no means exhaustive, feel free to inform me of more in the comments, I will add them to the list) :

• Running from within a browser your app won’t have the native built-in styles available unless you use CSS to mimic them. There are frameworks that have been created to that effect. Sencha Touch comes with two default themes for iOs and Android and there are JQuery Mobile Themes available as well.
• Performance will take a hit because of the extra layer between the app and the OS.
• Access to the some of the native phone high level functionality is sometimes limited.
• Support is sometimes hard to come by for specific issues, since this is a community supported project.

Those issues withstanding, I still think that PhoneGap is only poised to get better, and improve support for more native functionality. I think it is complimentary to my web development skills and allow me to expand into a new market without really stepping out of my comfort zone. If you are worried about native feature support or exploiting more of the native SDK, you should definitely look into Titanium, from Appcelerator which offers to “translates your hard won web skills into native applications that perform and look just like they were written in Objective-C [iPhone and iPad] or Java [Android]”.

Here is a list of links I found useful on the matter:

• Mobile App Development for Web Developers
• An overview of Sencha Touch
• PhoneGap vs Titanium Mobile, et al
• PhoneGap vs Native SDKs for Mobile App Development
• XUI: A super micro tiny DOM library for authoring HTML5 mobile web applications.
• JQTouch: A Sencha jQuery plugin for mobile development
• Interface This: An excellent comparison of the different frameworks based on actual experience by Dave. A Must Read.